The Fierce Voice of Tony Quagliano

Language Matters–Selected Poetry © by Tony Quagliano, 2012

-- New York Quarterly Books

The Image and the Word

Picture This if You Will: The words we know, all the words we have acquired along with the ways of connecting them in all our respective cultures, are nothing less than the irreducible expression of a singular nature we call human.

We are selves in a world because we have words.

'The Present State of American Poetry XVIII,' New York Quarterly 47, 1992

Tony loved jazz, and wrote of jazz often. The qualities of jazz—rhythm and sound—underlie his poetry. Joanne Yamada writes:

"For Quagliano, such qualities always incorporate the conscious fusion of the sound of the word within a rhythmic structure."

In amazing and unexpected ways, Tony brought the sounds of words together and, likewise, the confluence of ideas/thoughts together. As Joseph Stanton wrote in response to Quagliano’s poem and book of the same name, Fierce Meadows:

"Tony Quagliano is the master of a perceptual jazz, of a poetic-improvisation technique that makes from the random litter of everyday events a fine, bright, mocking kind of music. Quagliano seems to find his poems through a whimsical attentiveness to the rhythms of being there, inside wherever he happens to be."

Tony Quagliano described himself and his writing as utterly independent and contrarian.

His poetry brings light to distressing accidents of human history, as in Bio-Politics of Molokai:

if the chinese brought leprosy to paradise

why say so? did they want it

to give or have

any more than you or me?

if the british brought syphilis to paradise

why say so? did they want it

to give or have

any more than you or me?

if a thousand years of european serfdom 

brought indentured slavery to paradise 

why say so? could they have valued labor 

any more than you or me? 

if the shriven congregationals of honolulu 

shunned the belgian papist for his pride 

losing themselves forever, are they lost 

any more than you or me? 

besides, the leprosy might have been east asian 

the syphilis french, slavery american 

class arrogance polynesian, and if eternal 

damnation is equally distributed among all 

the peoples of all the world, isn’t that 

aloha spirit, the rainbow truth 

of paradise, of leprous molokai the friendly isle 

and would anyone want it otherwise 

any more than you or me? 

Quagliano railed against the creative-writing workshopniks and the adolescent PC, small-time, graceless self-deceivers. He told them to Get Out of Poetry by Sundown:

… or in poetry false

as silly Bunny Collins

perfect poet/laureate in the age

of Shrub…

He excoriated the false, tortured-language frauds and poseurs in Semiotic Self-Deconstruction:

Most theorists

of language

don't write very well

and their theories

don't tell them why

Though utterly independent, Tony had a big heart. He often gave encouraging words to countless poets urging them to continue their writing. Tony truly wanted to have the poet Wing Tek Lum hone the best of his words, sending the poet this message in Last Chance Poem for Wing Tek Lum. As the editor of KAIMANA, Quagliano sought quality—"I just publish the very best stuff I get."

And he had fun with poetry, as in The Showdown:

'Read it and weep,' the stranger said,

'it's my acceptance speech for the

Nobel Prize in Literature.

I'm on my way to Sweden now

to pick it up.'

'THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE?'

A murmur broke out in the bar

and the rest of Bart's gang backed out the door.

'Your boys are hightailing it, Bart.

It's time for you to do the same.'

'Jeez! The Nobel!'

The stranger's eyes narrowed to slits.

'That's right. For a lifetime

of poems and philosophy.'

'Pomes?'….

In One for WCW at the Post-Nuclear Philosophy Conference in Manoa, Quagliano noted the quotidian doctoring and the transcendent poetry of William Carlos Williams as poetry at its best:

…and while poetry/can't do much about it

the thing is

poetry

does the most

Tony, in his own words, “spoke truth to poetry” over all these long years. Between a Rock and Mahatma Gandhi is perhaps his most imagistic and elegant poem, one that transports us as readers or as listeners: from ourselves to places beyond ourselves and back to ourselves:

Between a rock and Mahatma Gandhi

which is better?

A rock is a perfectly fine

aggregation/of subatomic particles

Mahatma Gandhi alive is a perfectly

fine aggregation/of subatomic particles

a rock has rock sentience

Gandhi has Gandhi sentience

it’s not better to be a rock

or to be Gandhi

if nothing matters

we have powerful personal knowledge

that nothing matters

suicide knows nothing matters

war knows and torture

the tools of the torturer know

extinct species know nothing matters

opium knows

metallic concentrates in the brain

stunned by Alzheimer’s know

your house on fire while you are at the movies

the deepest inner thoughts of your great

grandfather’s great great grandfather know

the room he was born in knows

the biochemistry of a cancer cell knows

the questions asked by Torquemada know

ashes scattered at sea

the digestive tract of the insect

feeding on the conqueror worm knows

the library at Alexandria

self-destructive habits know

an empty tube of spermicidal jelly knows

the temperature of the air in a Siberian prison cell knows

a neutron in an oxygen atom in

the ozone layer knows

the volume of Niagara Falls knows

the last centimeter of the distance between

this page and Alpha Centauri knows

nothing matters across all time and space

nothingness

knows nothing matters

nothingness knows most

nothing matters

though a case can be made

made every day

that something matters

though the proofs don’t overwhelm

if something matters

only if something matters

Mahatma Gandhi is better than a rock

TONY QUAGLIANO published widely in numerous literary journals including New York Quarterly, New Directions, Harvard Review, Rolling Stone, Exquisite Corpse, Wormwood Review, and Negative Capability–The Big Easy Crescent City That Care Forgot.

His poems are also included in anthologies such as:

• The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses
• The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper
• The Poet Dreaming in the Artist’s House, among others

He authored five books of poetry:

• Language Drawn and Quartered (Ghost Dance Press, 1975)
• Fierce Meadows (Petronium Press, 1981)
• Snail Mail Poems (Tinfish Network, 1998)
• Pictographs (Red Moon Press, 2008)
• Language Matters (New York Quarterly Books, 2012)

He edited the Small Press Review "Bukowski Special Issue" (1973) and Feast of Strangers – Selected Prose and Poetry of Reuel Denney (1999).